Hierarchical decoding of double error correcting codes for high speed reliable memories

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As the technology moves into the nano-realm, traditional single-error-correcting, double-error-detecting (SEC-DED) codes are no longer sufficient for protecting memories against transient errors due to the increased multi-bit error rate. The well known double-error-correcting BCH codes and the classical decoding method for BCH codes based on Berlekamp-Massey algorithm and Chien search cannot be directly adopted to replace SEC-DED codes because of their much larger decoding latency. In this paper, we propose the hierarchical double-error-correcting (HDEC) code. The construction methods and the decoder architecture for the codes are described. The presented error correcting algorithm takes only 1 clock cycle to finish if no error or a single-bit error occurs. When there are multi-bit errors, the decoding latency is O(log2m) clock cycles for codes defined over GF(2m). This is much smaller than the latency for decoding BCH codes using Berlekamp Massey algorithm and Chien search, which is O(k) clock cycles - k is the number of information bits for the code and m ~ O(log2k). Synthesis results show that the proposed (79, 64) HDEC code requires only 80% of the area and consumes <; 70% of the power compared to the classical (78, 64) BCH code. For a large bit distortion rate (10-3 ~ 10-2), the average decoding latency for the (79, 64) HDEC code is only 36% ~ 60% of the latency for decoding the (78, 64) BCH code.